Meltdown
by Judy-Licious
Summary: It's a lot like decaying alive. — YamamotoGokudera


**Notes:** Feeling especially suicidal today. Huzzah. Also, I've been toying with the idea of the many parallel universes in KHR fusing together for a long time now, and I'm kind of disappointed that this fandom doesn't provide me with much material to expand my ideas with.  
**Notes 2:** Please leave a review!

* * *

It's a lot like decaying alive.

He just wishes it wouldn't hurt that much.

* * *

Noon.

The sun stands high; he feels it on his legs, even though it's so far, far away. It's penetrating him on the other side of his conscious, where the world is grey and the Tenth is long dead.

"Gokudera," Shamal says from above. His voice is barely more than a whisper. "You're dreaming. Wake up, you're dreaming."

"I know," Gokudera answers, and sinks in deeper. "Let me."

"No," Shamal insists, but the word runs through Gokudera's mind like water through his fingers would.

All the jagged edges of his thoughts are melting, merging into one.

* * *

Gokudera wakes up in the infirmary.

A faint orange glow pours from the windows down on the linoleum floor. He feels the springs of the mattress creak under his weight as he sits up, fabric to skin and skin to bone. From a chair next to the bed Yamamoto watches him quietly, looking somewhat blurred in the early twilight.

"You passed out during recess," he says, eyes distant. "How are you?"

Gokudera turns and slowly moves his feet toward the ground. "Okay," he murmurs, and pauses for a second. "I had a dream."

"What was it about?"

The floor is smooth and strangely foreign beneath Gokudera's feet.

"I don't remember."

* * *

Reeling over, Gokudera can only clutch his gut before everything disintegrates into white noise. His insides are caving in upon themselves, his grip on reality is corroding.

The universes are colliding right inside his head.

There are over a dozen Vongola families in it, and in one he is the boss's right hand man, in the other it's Yamamoto, and in another he's left alone with his regrets.

He closes his eyes, but the images keep spiraling down.

* * *

A jolt of pain rips him away from his slumber.

Yamamoto is snoring in the bunk above him. In a way, the sound is comforting, familiar, though he can't recall which part of himself the memory belongs to.

He wants to curl up into a ball, curve all of him into this shard of remembrance until all the other pieces have vanished. But he cannot escape them. They are already inked into every fiber of his being.

The next day he faints again, during an ambush on the enemy with Chrome.

He imagines he's floating, following the different currents of the manifold worlds tattooed into his mind, sometimes gently, sometimes in violent torrents.

* * *

"There's something wrong with you," Bianchi observes, adjusting her sunglasses.

"No shit," Gokudera snorts, stretching until his toes bump into the cold metal bars of his bed.

"No, I mean. I." Her voice breaks, and she is blindingly _real_ in front of the white walls of this room. "Not physically. Something _inside of you_."

Even if Gokudera has anything to counter that, he does not get the chance to as the door is pushed open and the doctor arrives with his blood values.

* * *

He knows Yamamoto is watching him like a hawk. Even more so than the rest of them.

One day he doesn't go to school, just to escape it all, and when he returns, Yamamoto sits on the stairs to his flat, painfully desperate and lost.

Then Gokudera snaps. There is a lot of screaming and thrashing out, but it stops abruptly as they stumble and end up as an awkward heap of entangled limbs on the floor.

"Hey," Yamamoto says in between short, shallow breaths. "Hey, don't ever do this again, yeah?"

And Gokudera has to look away because he sees more Yamamotos than exist in this reality, and there isn't really much to say to that, anyway.

* * *

Life becomes more and more broken.

If he's not sleeping, his spirit contorted into a million things all at once, he's forgetting. Names, places, and most of all people.

He's like a seashell that's being carved out bit by bit, day by day.

At the apex of the process, he doesn't wake up for a week.

When he finally does, he sees faces he knows, but he can't bring them into the right order.

"Who are you?" he inquires carefully, his tongue feeling numb and tired. He really just wants to fall asleep again.

Almost all of them are frozen in shock except for a tall boy with short, black hair who smiles at him like everything around him is going to burst.

"Nice to meet you," he says a bit weakly. "My name is Yamamoto."

Gokudera dips his head in acknowledgement, but derails mid-movement, his mind empty like a blank slate, and stares at the strangers in front of him.

"Who are you?"

* * *

And this world is no place

For a mind or a thought

No, it's not

Well, that's been said before

—Marina and the Diamonds, Space and The Woods


End file.
